Differentiating collegial intervention and corrective action

At the Credentialing Resource Center Symposium in Las Vegas, March 12-13, 2015, speaker Todd Sagin, MD, JD, will address several hot-button medical staff issues. Sagin offers a unique perspective to medical staff issues as both a lawyer and physician. Below, he answers a common question regarding monitoring physician performance.

 

 

A: There is tremendous public pressure on medical staffs to do a better job of addressing quality and safety concerns posed by practitioners privileged through the medical staff. The good news is that medical staffs across the nation are doing a much better job of monitoring physician performance through the mechanisms of FPPE and OPPE. However, some medical executive committees are overly quick to pull out the tools of corrective action when they perceive a concern with a colleague. This is often because of a lack of familiarity with the full range of collegial interventions available to assist those practitioners with clinical or behavioral problems. Whenever possible, we should work to utilize collegial tools before calling on the more consequential interventions of corrective action.